But you, girlfriend, look like shit, oh boy, you really look like shit: at least forty, even after you went out and got your hair cut (she had mustered all her strength for this heroic deed, because her condition was such, especially in the evenings, that one time she almost fell asleep still in her clothes and only the strangely conscious pang of fear through the sticky haze of her heavy brain—what is this, have I lost it totally?!—forced her finally to lower her legs to the floor, feel around for her bathrobe, change, and stumble to the bathroom: don’t forget your makeup, with a cotton ball, that’s it, dip it into the lotion, wipe under your eyes, now brush your teeth, first gargling with Listerine, excellent, good girl, and now into the shower!—and now, okay, here we go, nice rubdown with the towel, nighttime Oil of Olay, there’s the black box on the shelf, first the neck, then the face, pat-pat, with fingertips, massage it a bit, good, done, don’t forget, lid back on the jar—and now you’re all set to go to bed, everything in order)—and all that effort as much good as hot compresses for a corpse: unexpectedly emerging to meet herself in one of those full-length mirrors, whether in a store or on the street, she at first wouldn’t recognize this hag in familiar, elegant outfits, and it wasn’t just the frightening skin, suddenly aged by several years (you should really smoke less…) and blotched with remnants of pimples, and not even the flaccid outline of the bottom half of her face, like a balloon that had lost air (get ready to hear a bunch of whining the minute someone with a face like that opens her gob!), but this now: here’s something new—something had imperceptibly changed in her whole posture, her gestures, her walk: that unrestrained drive of an airplane gathering momentum for take-off that had always been within her was gone, and, removing her tinted glasses she looked closer: yes, her eyes had lost their spark—they no longer leapt from her face like projector lights, but rather hid in it with such tearstained sorrow that she herself couldn’t wait to avert her glance elsewhere. They say that according to statistics a person looks into the mirror forty-three times a day—forty-three times you, squeezed by deep fear and still not quite believing it, stare at this Megaera aghast: so this is me? From now and forever? (And immediately the tears well up, this time from hopelessness, a forgotten feeling from adolescence.) Hmm, yeah, this is bad. No wait, if you changed the lighting, take it from above and at a slight angle it wouldn’t be quite so bad, there’s still something of that old me showing through… Oh, please!—whom are you kidding? Last winter still, during that flight through Frankfurt when she was sitting curled up by the wall and fervently writing something down in her notepad, reeling with invisible pain—packs of young men walking by would slow down with curiosity, trying to strike up a conversation: “Hi, girl!”; only a year ago in Cambridge a super stud was pursuing her, good-looking and an athlete, six foot two and about that much across the shoulders, too, gentle as a baby rabbit, with skin like dark silk and the smell of a healthy young man, ah, what a lover he would have been—you can wring your hands now, go ahead, and to her “I’m ten years older than you,” he replied after a pause, surprised, “You’re lying”—for him, too, she was, sincerely and simply, a “girl” he liked—while for her, rather than being seductive, that invincible force of ignorant health, that happy and confident